Welcome to the Official page of the Presidency of the Portuguese Republic

I greet all those present in this 12th COTEC National Innovation Meeting. It is always with the greatest interest that I follow COTEC’s initiatives and the prolific work that it has carried out since its inception.

The setting up of COTEC in 2003 was inserted in a European political environment that aimed to assert knowledge, technology and innovation as bulwarks for the economy’s competitiveness and of the development of societies.

That was its founding purpose, with 100 companies which represented, at the time, approximately 18% of national GDP. The impulse for innovation in companies, particularly amongst SMEs, was already being assumed as the most fertile means for economic growth and for the 21st century’s new development model.

Throughout these years COTEC has notably contributed to consolidate the idea that the culture of innovation is a true national intent, an intergenerational purpose that must be shared by all.

It challenged companies and institutions within the scientific system to join efforts towards mutual benefit and reciprocal valuation.

It dared young entrepreneurs to transform ideas into businesses.

It challenged companies to increase the qualification of their human resources.

The COTEC Europe Meetings, with the presences of the Heads of the Participating States, were also moments of great consequence.

Since the very beginning that, amongst the three European COTEC organizations, links were established for experience exchanges, which enabled creating a common area of reflexion that provided due standing to the specificities of the Southern Europe economies within the framework of European policies.

More than a decade later, it must be recognized that COTEC’s action was transversally comprised in public and private policies, the relation between innovation, technological development and economic competitiveness now being consentient.

COTEC was able to associate very relevant concepts with an insistent and demanding practice of creating effective instruments, which leveraged the real transformation in the attitudes of economic and social agents.

Instruments such as the Diagnosis of assessment, the Standard and the Barometer of innovation were, along these years, crucial to sensitize entrepreneurs and other economic agents and to reconstitute their actions.

One of the most far reaching initiatives was the setting up of the SME Innovation Network, an example of entrepreneurial coordination and cooperation to be followed by all sectors of activity.

When the network of Innovative SME’s started up, the companies with high intensive technology were predominant. Nowadays there is greater expression in capital goods, in the agricultural, forestry and food industries, in plastics and moulds, in electronics, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, health and footwear.

This progress, important in every way, in the field of the represented industries, easily demonstrates the changes which are happening in the Portuguese industrial fabric and which, I am certain, will assert itself even further in the near future.

Innovation was also, anyway, the key factor that enabled many companies to resist and strengthen themselves in times of great demands.

As I already had the occasion to refer, the success of the SME Innovation Network, which I have followed up since it’s been launched, and its successive expansion, which I have always encouraged, are the result of a coherent and structured approach in the innovation process and of COTEC’s tenacious follow up work.

I greet the companies that have now been accepted in the SME Innovation Network, selected through strict assessment criteria, and which accepted the challenge and the responsibility to be part of a group of great prestige and entrepreneurial responsibility.

Another initiative that greatly contributed towards the visibility and to the capability for dissemination of COTEC’s work was the consistent policy of recognizing the merit of companies and entrepreneurs, whose work and success, assessed by strict criteria, deserve becoming an example and stimulus for many others and a motive of pride for the whole Country.

In this sense, I wish to congratulate the companies distinguished today with the Product and SME Innovation Prizes, their leaders and workers, for the notable way in which they applied innovation as a weapon of assertion in their respective markets.

In this context, it is worthwhile underlining the widening of this strategy of valuation of the Portuguese entrepreneurial fabric to Portuguese communities abroad. It is a question, as abundantly shown by the Entrepreneurial Innovation Prize, of taking full advantage of the enormous potential of our fellow citizens that work and live abroad, who can and want to help, and with whom the Country wants and may count upon.

COTEC was also a pioneer in a new culture of encouragement and support to innovatory initiatives through company incubators and accelerators, a stake already gained by the new means of stimulating entrepreneurialism and mitigating its associated risk, providing opportunities for many initiatives which, otherwise, might never have come out in the open.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The theme of this Meeting is the application of knowledge and innovation, in order that its assimilation in the company’s fabric also results in the increase and consolidation of stable relations of qualified employment.

In order to grow, create roots and occupy its place in society, a company must possess not just technological investment but also a corresponding consolidation of its labour relations with all those whose efforts contribute towards its good results.

As we are well aware, the more common indicators do not always allow a correct appraisal of a company’s potential.

This is the case with patents, R&D expenditure, amongst others that, of great importance, may not be sufficient to provide a reliable picture of the soundness of the organization and of its future trajectory.

Similarly to what COTEC carries out in the SME Innovation Network, it is important to ask our companies and their entrepreneurs questions such as: how many knowledge workers do you employ? How much do you invest in their training? What perspectives of professional development are offered as of the expectations of the company’s success?

In this sense I have already had the opportunity to state, in this same forum, that there is an insufficient valuation, in Portugal, either of the talent and the potential of individual development, or of the contribution that this human potential may represent for entrepreneurial organizations.

We must value the potential of talent produced in Portugal and create conditions to attract and maintain those that, otherwise, will search elsewhere for their professional fulfilment. We thus have to create attractive conditions for all of them, for those who wish to stay and for those that, living abroad, aim returning to Portugal.

Talent management, a topic which has been being approached by COTEC, is a requirement addressed to the leaderships of companies and organizations and a determining issue for our collective future.

Entrepreneurial leaders will have to play and enlightened and motivating action, capable to determine talent, and to capture, develop, and bring about all the potential held within the knowledge society.

This is the way through which innovating companies may become consolidated and real transformers of the social and economic fabric in which they belong.

This is undoubtedly an ambitious dimension which, I am certain, COTEC will know how to interpret and more than ever comprise in its action.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

This is, very possibly, the last of the 47 COTEC initiatives in which I have taken part during my two mandates.

I thank you all, managements and their teams, and congratulate you for the extraordinary work which I have witnessed throughout these 10 years, work which was on a par with the expectations and ambitions that prescribed the birth of COTEC Portugal.

I will continue following, with great interest, the future projected path that COTEC is committed to and which will represent, I am certain, a further fundamental contribution for the development and creation of wealth in Portugal.

My best wishes go for your continuing this splendid work, on behalf of Portugal and of the future generations.

To you all, my very best thanks.